A Darkness Descending (6 page)

In her pocket Luisa’s phone chirruped, to indicate a text message: surreptitiously she looked down.
Looking into Frazione Verde
, it read.
Lawyer with Giuli. Missed call from Pietro.
What did that mean? She looked back at Giusy with resignation.

That Giusy was a
Berlusconiana
did not surprise Luisa: the girl was as empty-headed as candyfloss on a stick. And plenty of people had voted for him, no doubt a few decent ones among them, or he wouldn’t be in power, would he?

‘I know his mother,’ said Luisa, and Giusy had the grace to look uneasy.

‘Right,’ she said, busying herself in the near-empty plastic tub, eyes averted. Then raised her head again. Actually,’ she said in a different voice, ‘I think I went to school with him. The Scuola Agnesi, behind Santo Spirito. Before we moved out.’

So the burning-eyed left-winger had been in a
scuola elementare –
and a notorious hotbed of firebrand teachers – with Giusy. That was a turn-up. By the time Giusy started work in the shop, her family had lived in a comfortable modern apartment in Scandicci, and she was engaged to be married. Luisa had never known she grew up in the grimy old streets of the Oltrarno – and forty years ago, they really had been grimy. Looking at her now, with her eight-hundred-euro jacket and her long pink nails, it was hard to imagine.

‘What was he like?’ Luisa said mildly. Giusy sat back in her chair and her face took on the expression – so unusual for her that for a moment Luisa couldn’t work out what the problem was – of effortful thought. ‘Grubby,’ she said eventually. ‘Untidy, always a rip in his coat, trousers too big. Nobody liked him.’

‘Huh,’ said Luisa, remembering the bonneted baby and wondering how it had escaped that attentive dictator of a mother so far as to become a scruffy child. But then again, she was surprised at the mother sending him to that school; she’d have thought the woman would have scrimped to send him to the nuns in Piazza San Felice, where the children wore little pinafores.

‘Nobody liked him,’ Giusy repeated.

Well, Luisa could see that fastidious Giusy wouldn’t have: she was still frowning, though. ‘Not just me. Not just – really nobody. He was odd. He didn’t care what people thought of him. And he was – that kind of clever, you know. The kind that keeps people out.’

It was character analysis of a kind Luisa had never heard from Giusy before, and she stared. Giusy put out her hand for the newspaper, and as Luisa conceded it the electronic squeal of the door upstairs sounded. Giusy paid no attention, staring instead at the page.

‘I thought he’d had a kid,’ she said slowly. ‘Where did I hear that?’

‘So someone didn’t mind the holes in his clothes,’ said Luisa drily, getting to her feet. Sometimes, working in a place like this with someone like Giusy, she wondered about whether a lifetime of looking after her appearance – not to mention her customers’ – might have been a little misguided. Even if such a suggestion might shake some sectors of society to their foundations.

‘Yeah,’ said Giusy absently, tapping the page with a long pink nail. ‘Someone. Who did he marry, then?’

From upstairs Beppe was calling: still Giusy gazed down at the page.

‘I’ll go then, shall I?’ said Luisa, turning away without waiting for an answer.

On the stairs she could hear a voice she recognized talking to Beppe, although in an unfamiliar register. Higher than usual, with an anxious politeness in it.

‘Yes,’ the woman was saying distractedly. ‘And how is your sister, Giuseppe?’ No one called Beppe ‘Giuseppe’, at least not for twenty years they hadn’t.

‘Gloria?’ said Luisa, with disbelief, stepping on to the shopfloor.

Pietro’s wife, round, red-headed Gloria Cavallaro, who never shopped for clothes anywhere but the old-fashioned place on the road where they lived, with its window display of lace nighties and sensible sweaters. What could she be doing here? Gloria turned helplessly towards her.

Luisa held out her hands without thinking; there was something more in Gloria’s expression than unease at how out of place she was in the dress she obviously wore for cleaning the house, here on the dove-grey carpet and amongst the expensive black cocktail wear.

‘What is it, Gloria?’ She was ten years younger than Luisa but her pretty, usually animated face looked worn and pale, freckles standing out against the white skin. She was clasping her hands together and turning them over distractedly.

Tactful as ever, Beppe stepped back from them, nodding towards menswear upstairs, and with a flick of her head, Luisa said, ‘Yes, go.’

‘Has something happened, Gloria?’ Pulling her hand gently, folding the other woman close to her on instinct. She thought of Sandro’s impenetrable message, and of more things that might go wrong. ‘Pietro?’ she said, faltering. She had spent enough years fending off anxiety during Sandro’s time in the force to know how that felt.

Gloria looked up: she smelled of violets, this close, her face only centimetres from Luisa’s. ‘Not Pietro,’ she said. ‘It’s Chiara.’

Chapter Five

T
HE LAWYER
’
S OFFICE
,
LIKE
the lawyer himself, was unexpected. In the untidy room, heaped with papers, the bookshelves overflowing into teetering stacks on the floor and chairs, Giuli watched Sandro for his reaction.

The man himself – Carlo Bastone, the prop and right-hand man – suited the room. Short, stocky, rumpled, a substantial belly pushing at the buttons of a knitted waistcoat over which a badly knotted tie sat skewiff. He held out his hand hesitantly to Sandro as he came around from behind a desk mostly hidden under the same landslide of paper that looked as if it had only recently come to rest in the room.

Looking from one face to the other, Giuli saw both men take each other in and relax, in Sandro’s case only fractionally.

Carlo Bastone looked uncertain, as well he might. Giuli had been garbled in her explanation, on the phone, of why they needed to talk to him. ‘Niccolò’s fine,’ he’d repeated over and over again. ‘Why do you need to see me? There’s nothing to worry about.’ She’d said something about wanting to help, about strategy for the press, and he’d gone quiet. It was only when she’d told him she was Enzo’s girlfriend that he’d agreed.

They loved Enzo, the Frazione. Perhaps for the same reasons Giuli loved him.

Because he was good. Because he thought only of others: of his mother’s catalogue of minor complaints, his father’s emphysema, of Giuli’s night terrors. When she’d sit up straight in bed, gasping for air, trying to remember the thing she’d forgotten, or left behind to die.

And when Rosselli had gone down like a ninepin on the stage it was Enzo who, having established that Giuli was all right and safely at the edge of the room, had worked his way doggedly through the crowd until he reached the man lying motionless on the wooden platform. It had been Enzo, earnest under the daft haircut that Giuli had learned to love, who’d laid him on his side in the recovery position, and had cleared a space around him and loosened his shirt. Checked his breathing until, after what seemed like hours, Niccolò Rosselli had begun to move.

It had been Enzo, fretting all night afterwards, who had impelled Giuli all the way here, nagging Sandro along too, calling and begging the lawyer to see them.

‘A strategy for the press?’ On the telephone Bastone had seemed surprisingly unworldly, for a man who’d gone all the way through law school and written learned papers on all sorts of things. He didn’t even have a secretary to field his calls. But the words did seem to be getting through. ‘Do you think we need that?’

Now he turned from Sandro to Giuli, his expression brighter. ‘Miss Sarto,’ he said, and an eager note entered his voice. ‘I did wonder – what you said about the press. As you know, we don’t have a press office—’ And at this he looked around himself at the shambles of his office as though wondering how it had all got there. ‘Perhaps you – perhaps we do need one.’

‘I’d say,’ Sandro broke in, ‘I’d say that right now you do. You – I mean your Frazione – you need someone to tell people what’s going on.’

Giuli saw Bastone’s face cloud. ‘Well,’ he began hesitantly.

‘Or don’t you know yourself?’ said Sandro, and it was quite apparent by the despondency with which Bastone sat down abruptly, in a small puff of dust, that Sandro had hit the nail on the head.

They stood, waiting, until eventually Bastone looked back up and said, ‘Oh. Yes. Do sit down.’

They extracted two rickety chairs from the mess and sat with him around a table overflowing with paper. Giuli sat on the edge of hers. ‘Is he really all right?’ she said. Sandro sat back a little, arms folded, watching Bastone. In a silver frame on the shelf behind the lawyer was the portrait of a sweetly smiling elderly woman: his mother, presumably.

Bastone stood up again, and went to the long, dusty window. He stood there a moment in the soft late-summer light, looking down into the street.

‘They told us it’s something like nervous exhaustion,’ he said, the pouchy, olive-skinned face he turned to them sagging with worry. ‘The tests were all inconclusive. He’s just been overdoing it.’

He ran his hands through hair that lay in oily waves high off his forehead. These idealists, thought Giuli with reluctant disapproval. Grubby, disorganized, chaotic. Does it have to be this way? Enzo was the neatest man she’d ever met, so she knew it didn’t.

‘Overdoing it,’ Sandro repeated. ‘Is that what you think? You know him. You’re – what? His campaign manager?’

Bastone puffed out his cheeks, ran his hands through his hair again. ‘Yes, I suppose I am, something like that.’

‘How long have you known each other?’ Sandro asked, and Giuli leaned forward over her knees at the sound of the careful softness in his voice. She wanted to know how to do that.

The lawyer brightened visibly in response. ‘Oh, a long time,’ he said, and as he smiled, his whole face changed. ‘Since high school, as a matter of fact. We attended the Liceo Machiavelli together. And then we were both at the university, although Niccolò stayed on after I graduated, to get his PhD.’

‘The Machiavelli,’ mused Sandro, and Giuli knew what he was thinking. It had to be the Machiavelli.

The high school was no more than a hundred metres from where they were sitting. One of Giuli’s favourite buildings in the city, a nice palace on the river, a sunny spot, and the school to go to if you were into protest, that was for sure. Its frontage always decorated with graffiti, sheets hung up with painted slogans announcing one student sit-in or other, and a bunch of eager kids running up and down asking passersby for money. They made her laugh … just their youth made her laugh. When Giuli had been seventeen she had been on the streets, but there was something about these nicely dressed, well-nourished teenagers who thought they were fighting for change that she loved. Because they might just be glued to Facebook now or eating ice cream or shopping, but they really were fighting for change – even if they weren’t always sure what they wanted things to change to.

‘Someone has to,’ was what Enzo had said when he’d first talked to her about the Frazione and she’d looked sceptical. ‘You know? Someone has to stand up and get change started. You can’t rely on other people to do it.’

‘So,’ Sandro was saying. ‘You’re close.’

Bastone’s head seesawed in reluctant agreement. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As close as – well, as close as it’s possible to be to Niccolò.’ He moved away from the window and sat back down at the table, in shadow, his head between his hands. ‘I’m beginning to wonder, though. If it’s a matter of politics – yes. I know everything about him – where his beliefs came from, what his ideas are on local urban development or fuel emissions or foreign policy or the preservation of the city’s parks or museum entry or prostitution …’ He sighed. ‘But the rest?’

‘So in other words, you
don’t
know what’s going on,’ said Sandro.

‘I know he’s been working hard – politically, yes. For the last six months, yes, I suppose there’s been more pressure on him, since things took off. A huge amount, battles to fight already, going to city hall with petitions, lobbying the military to delay the permissions on the new road: he likes to get down to the detail. To be hands on. We weren’t exactly prepared. He’s always thrived on it, it didn’t occur to me to think he was overdoing things. But—’ And he stopped speaking again.

In the silence, from below them somewhere in the building, came the bang of a heavy door and the sudden cacophonous echo of raised voices.

‘In his private life, though?’ And Sandro leaned forward on the table that lay between them.

Uneasily Bastone looked towards the solid panelled door, and for the first time Giuli saw that there were things he wasn’t telling them: as Sandro glanced towards her, she could see that he knew, too.

‘I can’t—’ said the lawyer. ‘I can’t—’ And then the door was opened abruptly. A woman stood there in an unbuttoned coat, seventy-five if she was a day but tall, upright, almost masculine in appearance, her white hair pulled back from a strong, raw-boned face and deepset eyes. Bastone started to his feet, his oily hair flopping untidily with the sudden movement. ‘Maria,’ he said, sounding panicky.

‘Carlo,’ said the woman, and Giuli heard impatience and contempt in the way she addressed him. This was a woman used to being cleverer than those around her, even lawyers. She was staring at Sandro and Giuli with undisguised hostility.

Carlo Bastone was looking from the new arrival to his seated guests as if he had no idea how to proceed. Sandro stood up. ‘Sandro Cellini,’ he said stiffly, with a tiny bow.

And the woman folded her arms across her strong, spare body as if to reject absolutely the possibility that she might shake Sandra’s hand, should he prove rash enough to offer it. Watching the two of them size each other up, Giuli saw the tiniest glint of watchfulness come into the old woman’s eye. She knows, she thought: she knows Sandra’s not stupid.

‘I’m sorry,’ stammered Bastone in a panic. ‘This is – this is – Niccolò’s—’

‘Maria Rosselli,’ said Sandro. ‘Yes. I know.’ And again he bowed. ‘I believe you know my wife.’